Are Bad Proxies From Free Proxy Sites Really Stealing From You?

If you’re wasting time feeding bad proxies into your expensive internet marketing software, then Yes you are losing money you could have gained from that software marketing your products effectively.

That’s Great John, But What’s a Proxy Got To Do With Internet Marketing Software?

Sorry – should back up a bit – surely I’m not ranting already 😉

There are lots of internet marketing software you can buy that can be used to promote your web sites, gather intelligence about competitors, create accounts for you, and heaps of other cool stuff.

To do these sorts of things the software needs to repetitively visit the same sites, and to do this effectively they need a constant source of fresh live proxies.

Oh, and a proxy is just an IP address with a port number on it – eg. 204.34.67.10:5432 (random thing I just entered – but hey, test it if you want).

What if I Just Don’t Use Proxies?

If you don’t use proxies your IP can get blacklisted by sites that don’t like people, or robots, constantly accessing their sites.

There is nothing worse than accidently getting blocked by google, and then all hell breaks loose as those on your network break down your door and demand normalcy be returned – could be your wife, flatmates, or your entire workplace network.

It only happened to me once on a work network when I couldn’t resist testing out my shiny new blog posting tool that I bought at work – needless to say, very embarrassing when everyone saw this, popped their heads out of their cubicles looking who to string up by the neck!

Where To Get Proxies From?

Basically you have 2 options.

Buy access to Private or Semi-Private proxies (can get expensive)

Free proxies (really cheap, er because they are free!)

There are some great places to find free proxies on the internet, and some places that are just a complete waste of time. This is because there is a difference between Good Proxies and Bad Proxies.

Good Proxies and Bad Proxies

Because lots of people have access to these free proxies they naturally get used more, and what happens is that sites will tend to block the good proxies quicker.

If you use bad proxies in software, it will simply not work properly. Stands to reason, because if the software can’t access the sites properly for whatever it is designed to do, then it won’t be able to bring back the web site data into the software.

This is why IM (internet marketing) software is only as good as the proxies you put into them.

With good tested proxies, IM software will run at their optimium – bringing down the data that your software needs, and quickly.

With good proxies:

Account creators can rapidly create accounts on Web 2.0 sites

Blog posters can rapidly post comments that are not automatically rejected, or fail because the software can’t even get to the blogs in the first place

Google scrapers can bring back search data and competitive analysis statistics over and over again without getting that dreaded ‘You’re a spamming piece of #%$&!’ message, just because you are using an automated tool – shame on you 😉

Your internet marketing business runs way more smoothly so you can stay focussed on making the all-important dosh $$$

How to Separate the Good From the Bad?

By hand 🙁
You could do it by hand, and put each proxy, one-by-one into the browser options settings, and then see if you can browse to say google.com.This would take forever though, and while you’re doing this crazy time-wasting boring-as-hell chore, other people are burning through the good proxies so that they’re bad by the time you get to actually using them!

What you really need is 🙂

Speed. I mean really really FAST!

Something that can handle large volumes of proxies – think hundreds, even thousands.

A dedicated piece of software that only checks proxies (no bloated stuff that you’ll never use) and does it really well.

Software that can check multiple proxies at the same time and work to the maximum power of your computer (multi-threaded).

It takes some pretty sophisticated programming to achieve this power, but I set myself the challenge and popped out an Ultra-Powerful Proxy Checker.

You can crank this baby up to go as hard or slow as you want, and just keep feeding it more and more proxies, even while it’s going – bit like a screaming baby wanting more-more-more!